Foliage for animation

[emti]

Could anyone tell me what foliage (trees mostly) would be the best for animation in 3ds + vray. RPC, Xfrog, Got3D or else?... I'm thinking about 3d or 2d/3d objects (no billboards). Any suggestions? It's for huge arch animation with bird-eye pespective.

 

thx.

[jonel]

how huge? how much trees?

I've done some animation, ~650 AEC Trees, 3-4 different models and bunch of instances of those to conserve memory, with ~250 rpc cars, rendered with under 1GB of total RAM usage (render+OS, apps).

It shouldn't be a problem to make a few custom trees and then instanciate them over the scene.

And put trees and cars as xRef scenes

[emti]

It's residential housing estate with 26 houses on the hill surrounded by the forest. I'm looking for the fastest solution.

[manta]

If you're using Vray, use vrayproxy meshes, and you shouldn't have much of a problem with thousands of trees even if they're high poly...

[animart]

If You Use Vray Be Carefuly Because The Image Based Trees Are Hiperslow I Think The Best Solution Is Whatever You Want But Render Trees Separately And Then Composite If You Need Vray For Millions Of Trees Dont Use Gi

[manta]

Yes GI will be harsh, an animation with 2,000 high poly trees using high GI settings was taking an hour per frame for me, but if you have access to a lot of computers you could cut that down considerably...